Eyes of the Wolf

27
When I got home, Dad immediately informed me that I had missed calls. I didn’t ask who had called me—I had a bad feeling that I already knew. However, he seemed immune to that intent of mine.

“You should call the guy back,” he said, a bit awkwardly. I sighed. “Maybe later,” I replied with a groan in my voice. I turned to go to my room, and he intercepted me.

“Maya, I don’t know who this was, but it sounded important, and he said it was important.”

“You didn’t know him?” He had talked to Niko on the phone, hadn’t he?

“No, but it sounded important,” he insisted.

I met his eyes, but he seemed sincere. Feeling guilty that I had somehow managed to doubt my dad—as if I hadn’t done enough of that in my life—I nodded and got the number, then found myself on one of the barstools with my legs crossed and the house phone cold-nosing my ear.

“Hello?” It was a familiar, masculine voice.

“Adam?”

“Maya.” He didn’t sound surprised at all to hear from me. “James says you need to come here, now.”

The Alpha? Why now?

“It’s important,” Adam told me. Like I hadn’t heard already.

“Why?” I prodded carefully, very aware that my dad was listening to me and that I couldn’t leave the room. Yay for my telling Dad that I didn’t want to get a cordless phone because there was a certain charm to having an older phone.

“Are you asking to ask, or because you need a story for your dad? It is your dad, right?”

Who else would it be? “Yeah, the other one.”

“Story?”

“Yeah.”

“Uhh…” Glad to know he wasn’t all werewolf con artist. In the background, I heard another, more impatient voice snarling, and then Roger on the phone. “Listen, just tell him you’re going for a run or something. You do that a lot, right?”

“Isn’t this an emergency?” I said dryly, immediately sharing his impatience. I heard mumbling behind the receiver, and I almost hung up out of sheer spite. I was still hormonal, and I would not be responsible for their pissing me off. Then Roger was saying brusquely, “Sparrow says he never said it was an emergency to his dad. He also says”— here his voice started oozing sarcasm and indignity—“that you were helping him with homework. What subject are you best at?”

“I’m…Calculus?” I altered my tone almost instantly, remembering that my father was listening. “Sure, I can help with calculus. What do you need?”

Adam’s voice answered me. “Tell me how to do some random problem, and then go and get ready for a run. Tell your dad—dad, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.” I prayed that Dad couldn’t hear that tone I was trying so hard to suppress…

“Okay.” Something told me Adam heard what I hoped my father had not. “I’m assuming you know how to get to us from there. One of us can even come meet you, if you should prefer, even, but make sure you don’t bring anyone.”

“I’ve never…done that,” I said, again changing my tone from defensive to ponderous in mid-sentence for my father’s sake. Didn’t he have something better to do?

“Okay, just making sure.” I heard Roger barking “Hurry!” in the background. “Do you want us meeting you or not?”

“That’s a way to go about it.”

“Okay.” As Roger’s voice seemed to completely shred my patience, he said, almost pleadingly, “Just hurry, please?”

I hung up the phone without a goodbye.

“Who was that?” Dad’s face appeared around the side of his chair.

“Some boy from school. He needed help with calculus.”

“I didn’t hear much math.”

“Well, he just likes to talk,” I blathered on my way to my room. “He just needed to blab a bit, and eventually he got it worked out on his own.”

“Do you know him?”

“Not really,” I replied, still marveling at how I had just described Adam as talkative. I supposed he was when the situation warranted it, but other than that…

And was this something to do with Niko?

“How does he have your number?” Had Niko done something wrong?

“I dunno. I’m gonna go for a run, okay?” I peered around my doorframe at my dad when he didn’t respond right away. “Dad?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Yeah, you can go.”

“All right.”

Moments later I was dressed and out the door.

:o3

I arrived at the wolves’ home with my escort of two canine guides that I didn’t know. Not sure what exactly this meant, I kept my mouth shut until we were in the house with James and a man that looked vaguely familiar to me. My companions up until then left me with them. Adam and Roger—or Niko, for that matter—were nowhere to be seen. Odd. I bristled as I saw the stranger’s nostrils flare slightly and his eyes elevator themselves up and down my body.

“Blade tells me that there is a considerable chance that you have been informing other humans of our existence.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. “What?” was my instant response, and I stared at the man that must have been Blade. “Why would…I haven’t,” I continued, hearing my tone conveying confusion. I didn’t blame it.

“He says you smelled like wolf while you were at the college this morning, and you were talking a lot with a human couple. Whatever you said made them argue and fight, and then the female sided with you and walked away, while the boy stayed behind and went onto the…blood bus?” The last was aimed at our listener. This listener nodded. I placed his face—scruffy appearance, worn clothes—finally, recognizing him as the man who had been loitering about while I was waiting for Chris.

“I remember you!” I exclaimed, and he looked at me with slight alarm. “You weren’t even there when I looked around before Chris and I left! How would you even know that all that happened?”

“I am not as deaf as you, halfie,” Blade snapped at me in a rough voice. His eyes were stove-flame blue, somehow more intense than any of the wolves I had met so far. It was harder to hold eye contact with him for some reason, and it was all I could do to keep eye contact and not surrender with a bowed head. “Your female friend wears shoes a snake could hear, and it was obvious when the male went through the only door there, when the cause of his scent disappears.”

“Did you speak of us, Maya?” asked James, much more gently than Blade.

“No,” I replied, still glaring out of the corner of my eye at Blade before turning my full attention to the pack Alpha. “Chris and Drake were arguing about whether or not Chris should drive, ‘cause she had just given blood and was acting weird. She got mad and stomped off, and I followed her, and she got mad at me for some reason, and I started yelling at her, and then we got over it and went home.”

“And you never mentioned wolves to this Chris?” pried James.

“No. I have never told Chris about any of you. All she knows is that I’m dating Niko, and that I have met his family, and…stuff like that.” The ending sounded lame, but the last thing I was going to tell a stranger and James was that I talked to Chris about the things that Niko and I did. I wondered if they noticed my hickey. Hickeys. Ugh.

Blade was still eyeing me suspiciously. I resisted the urge to pick up James’s wooden T.V. remote shelf and bludgeon him with it. I was still mad about his eyes having been so carelessly dragged over me. Would James move to prevent an attack on this guy should I do so?

Stupid musings, I knew. This guy could kill me easily, and probably without even reverting to his second form. But I could dream.

“All right. Remember our deal, Maya.” That last seemed to be just tossed in, judging by the tone, but the significance still weighed itself in the air. I nodded to him, glared at Blade, and walked out.

“Maya!” Niko ran to me and grasped my shoulders, bent almost double to look me straight in the eyes. His eyes seemed so bright a blue that they looked white. His hair was fading to an iron grey. Was he having trouble controlling himself?

Wouldn’t be the first time, I reminded myself, and I saw my expression register, and his face changed from almost frantic to confused. Then there was a visible but unvoiced “Oh.” It didn’t seem to be apologetic; it actually seemed sort of disgusted.

“Niko,” I acknowledged cooly. After Blade, meeting Niko’s gaze was no problem, and I stared him down easily. Despite his averted eyes, he still spoke.

“If you would like, I could escort you h—”

“I can make it.”

“You’re getting people to go with you anyway, Maya. Me or somebody else?”

“Somebody else.”

I heard him snarl as I brushed by him, and I felt his hands on my shoulders again.

“Maya, listen, we need to talk—”

“Talk all you want.”

“—we talk it out, it’ll be all smoothed over.”

I turned and glowered at him. He tugged in a breath and growled, “Is there a logical reason why you won’t go with me?”

“Yes. I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

“We’ve got to talk sometime.”

I didn’t dignify that with an answer. I heard his footsteps behind me, and he drew even with me as we entered the copse of trees. I tugged a breath into my lungs as a small breeze tugged my hair behind me.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” he began. I did, but I couldn’t see how it would stop him. “Why did you pull away last night?”

“That should be obvious.”

“Should it?”

“Yes.” He seemed to need elaboration. “I’m not ready for that.”

“What does that mean? Isn’t that why you’re going out?”

The words sent ice cubes to weigh me down. I gritted my teeth and hissed, “I’m not some slut that goes out and…and screws the first guy she dates. I’m not a slut, Niko.”

“I thought we were far enough along that—”

“I’m not in this to just get together and—” It dawned on me. Was this a wolf thing? Did he expect me to be with him just to…make puppies? “Look,” I tried. Try number two. “I wanna have kids someday, but I don’t want it to be something so sudden. I—”

A growl sounded behind me. Then another. Niko spun at my side to look behind us, and I whipped around as well. Two wolves—one grey with a bib of white on its chest, and one of colorings similar to that of a black Doberman, except every spot that would have been brown was pale as white-out. Both were huge.

“Run,” Niko growled next to me, the end of the word obliterated as his voice changed to that of a beast unable to make human words. I watched, frozen, as the black one trotted forward and, upon being attacked by Niko, began tearing at the silver wolf’s fur. The grey one prowled past, its eyes riveted on me. The snarls of the beasts next to me faded as I realized that I couldn’t outrun a wolf.

I would try.

I spun and charged into the trees behind me, and the wolf’s paws instantly pounded the path that had separated us. On pure reflex, I leapt and my foot caught on a low-hanging bough, and I scrambled higher. Teeth closed over my tennis shoe, and I kicked at its nose. The wolf released, and I came to notice pain in the ankle as I tried to move higher and realized that I couldn’t. The rest of the tree had a charred top, as if struck by lightning. Just my luck.

Looking down, I stared the grey wolf straight in the eyes. Blood was in its mouth, and I could only assume it was mine. I glanced to my savaged foot, and saw matching scarlet soaking my tattered shoe.

I swallowed and glanced back at the wolf. As I watched, it dropped away from the tree, glanced over its shoulder, and began to shift. With that shift, it would be able to climb.

I was going to die.